July 23, 2007

"When Art (or In What Regard)" is a collaborative project initated by artist Jeanette Doyle. The project is part of FLOAT curated by Sara Reisman, a biannual exhibition organized by Socrates Sculpture Park (in Long Island City, New York) in August, during which time the Park facilitates artistic projects that reflect the mediums with which sculpture overlaps: video, installation, performance, and other ephemeral and time-based practices that have a growing impact on sculptural and contemporary art practice in general.

This year, the exhibition has a loose theme dealing with the aesthetics of nostalgia for a future past. Referencing Fredric Jameson's "Archaeologies of The Future," the show has taken cues from artists who are dealing with questions surrounding time and longing for possibilities of a future that may be linked to ideologies of the past.

When Art (or In What Regard) will also circulate as a newsprint publication with contributions from up to 15 artists, curators, critics, and others that touch on the question of "When Art (or In What Regard)" which will include images and short texts that the contributors think capture the timeliness of art. This project does not intend to revisit 'What is Art', but seeks to weave together a dialogue about the status of an artwork in relation to time and its reception.

Jeanette Doyle developed the phrase 'When Art (or In What Regard)' following conversations with Sara Reisman, Marcia E. Vetrocq and Paddy Johnson. Her initial consideration of this topic was based on an email conversation with the artist, writer and curator Dave Beech where Doyle suggested considering 'When is Art' as a way to think freshly about the 'What is Art' problem.

So the conversation about "When Art" began with the question of an artwork's legitimacy in relation to when it is received by a viewer (hence the subtitle "In What Regard"), and what happens when a work is not seen. Does its value as an artwork diminish? Other areas in relation to "When" may be teased out through considering an artwork's fluctuating value within the art market and how a time-based work might only be considered an artwork after it takes place, through documentation and historicization.

Inserted into the public realm, like you i forgot, lingers like a whispered private thought; words are pronounced in the first person, thus provoking an identification for the audience. The phrase printed on the billboard creates in a short lapse of time, a visual delay, leaving the passersby with a thought to ponder rather than a slogan to consume. This billboard project subtly addresses the relevance of remembering as a personal and social vehicle to responsibility, healing and awareness.

Billboards are ephemeral; and they are destroyed and disappear when taken down. And it is precisely because of this disappearance that they are able to make their absence felt, alluring the passersby with anticipatory desire.

The original interview between Eric de Bruyn and Dan Graham was held
in New York in March 1967 and was initially published in Gloria Moure,
Dan Graham, exh. cat., pp. 195-205.

These video stills are from the Interview Project performed at
Magnus Muller Gallery in Berlin on May 24th, 2007 as part of a
performance program entitled "Redistribution of the Sensible" curated
by Warren.

The actors were David Egan, who played the role of Eric de Bruyn,
and Anna Finn, who played the role of Dan Graham. The images show the
actors re-enacting the interviews but at the same time a video camera
was recording the facial and hand gesticulations of the actors and
simultaneously projecting them on to the wall behind the actors. Thus,
you had the live action and the theatrical distance and at the same
time, the looped cinematic feed of the close up.

The original interview

Another re-enacted rendition of the interview was done as a radio
drama at the Moscow Biennial in 2007. This was a live performance in
which actors played the roles of Dan Graham and Eric De Bruyn.

Nobody runs the art world. No one is in charge of what gets seen where, when, or in what context. Lots of different people may be in charge of separate details here and there, and there might even be overlap, but by and large they represent completely disparate interests. The most common reason for exercising one’s option to get involved with art is that one has developed a keen interest in it, to the point of its becoming a passion.

Art is the closest model we possess for the absolutely free mind permitted to work in real time and space, completely unfettered by authority. There are always limits, but the biggest limit of them all seems to be the human will, which balks at being able to do exactly what it wants to when it gets the urge. Perhaps that is really why we have artists: to symbolically enact all that freedom on our behalf. This responsibility does not end with the making of the work, but continues with its designation as ‘art’ – i.e., something worth looking at. It should surprise no one to learn that this authority also belongs to every single one of us.

Of course, one does occasionally hear that all the major decisions in the art world are in the hands of a small cabal of power brokers, but this hardly seems consistent with what one experiences with one’s own senses. In fact, if you look closely, art seems to be bursting out of every available seam, with little consensus on what gets presented where. It’s surprising, really, how little encouragement art requires, but perhaps that’s because more people find themselves wanting art, even in those cases where they don’t actually know what it is.

Future Noir, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Electric Toads

Talk of utopia is thick in art and theory these days. Implicit but often unacknowledged in such invocations of a better society, however, is the dark possibility of ever worsening social conditions. In a remarkable recent essay on utopias, Fredric Jameson distinguished the merits of dystopian thinking as opposed to conservative tendencies of “anti-utopianism,” the latter discouraging even tentative speculations about the outlook of the future. Dystopian fantasies, most importantly those of classic future writers H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick and on through current iterations penned by George Saunders and Jonathan Lethem, harbinger the course of a present inattentive to the social and ecological consequences of the exploitation of people and resources which are now clearly attributable to untrammeled globalized capitalism.

This call to accountability in dystopian literature is a plea to see in the now the portent of a dire future especially because of its uncanny continuity with the forces that have shaped today. Dystopianism is then, like utopianism, a powerful way to think historically in the present about the possible shape and texture of the future. At times the prescience of dystopianism is its construction of an almost banal parallel present issuing from a mild realignment of historical forces. The precarity of the past and the ambiguities of understanding how exactly we came to the current organization of society are exploited in the best examples of sci-fi. Dick and Saunders are particularly adept at activating simple though ingenious thought-experiment devices: what would San Francisco be like today if Japan and Germany had won the war, what if there existed a theme park of prehistoric culture in which underpaid workers replicated the tedious existence of Neanderthals…

At the end of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the novel’s protagonist, the bounty-hunter Deckard, is exhausted after having “retired” several escaped robots and retreats to the post-nuclear landscape north of Los Angeles. So blighted is the novel’s environment that little biological life survives. Nonetheless, Deckard is thrilled to notice a living toad, which in his ennervated state salves his suicidal thoughts and brings him home again. His wife discovers, however, as she flips its underside open that the toad is just another of the novel’s mechanical animals. Yet even counterfeit creatures demand to be nurtured as an effect of humans having squandering the plentitude of nature. She calls an electric animal accessories store and orders the toad some artificial flies. The hybrids Dick and others imagine question the peculiar responsibilities and effects of today’s substitutes for experience, giving a forecast of a time out of joint which is neither the past nor the future but rather the fearsome parallax of the present.

I recall two recent art experiences
regarding the issues of art in relation to the present and to time in
general. For Performa in 2005 (a performance biennial), Marina
Abramovic reenacted six early performance pieces of her colleagues and
one by herself from the sixties and seventies, in the Guggenheim
Museum. I went to see most of them but could not really enjoy them as a
performance. I could not help but see it as a historian or as an
archaeologist, pondering questions like: How was the original or first
performance? What did the audience experience then? What is different
now when everything is different around these performances? And what
does or could it mean to me, here and now? I thought these performances
were unsuccessful in terms of a classical performance, which meant to
be an immediate, real time communication with the audience, an energy
transmission. At the same time, I considered the whole project to be a
very interesting and important act by the artist. Those pieces in the
Guggenheim did not have the energy and the presence that I expected,
however they made me think about some questions related to the
existence and visibility of art, over and over again.

Another case when very similar questions arose in my mind was
a couple of months ago I saw the recreated installation pieces by
William Anastasi mostly from the late sixties, in the project room of
The Drawing Center. I knew most of the pieces
from reproductions and descriptions, but when I entered the small room
on Wooster Street I experienced a kind of revelation. The pieces were
fresh and current somehow, even the more then thirty years old metal
plate, which was watered again and again in several exhibitions during
the decades. A par excellence artwork: an old, preserved and
appreciated object. I was very thankful that I had a chance to see
those pieces in real life. Although this was a powerful art experience,
again I wondered how could it be to see them for those, who saw them
ten or twenty years ago? How does someone see them who never even heard
of them, and what would I think and feel if I would see them again in
the future? In reference to the often seen and ignored things, I wonder
if it is possible that we have only one time chance to see an artwork,
or sometimes not even one? Or what Kundera says about the human
experience of pain could be valid also for the human experience of art:
we experience it three times, once when we imagine it, once when we
experience it in real life, and once when we remember of it. Either
way, from my side sometimes I have the feeling that art is happening
when we do not even notice it or do not pay attention at all. And this
always brings me some kind of relief and joy.

Not having any money compels a person do all kinds of things they might not if making rent weren’t so connected with having a place to sleep at night. For example, when I concluded that I was one of the city’s “essential workers” two days after the towers fell and would therefore have to go into work, fiscal circumstance probably informed that decision far more than the believe that dirty display cases would issue a blow too great for the average New Yorker to survive.As a result, while most of the city watched looping footage of the buildings fall from their homes, I spent my day cleaning fingerprints off the vetrines at the New York Public Library and somewhat unexpectedly speaking to a journalist looking for symbols of strength within the city.

I suppose it was my Windex and Kimwipe prop ensemble that gave me enough air of authority to inspire a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel to ask which work in The Public’s Treasures exhibition best represented New York hardiness.I’m not convinced I ever gave the man a direct answer, but I showed him a series of photographs of the Statue of Liberty before it had been assembled, explaining that documentation like this feels just as surreal as the towers falling because while everyone has either had or can imagine a physical relationship with these famous structures, we don’t have any more than a superficial understanding of how they were built. In other words, the towers were built with the cumulative knowledge of thousands, so just as the expertise required to construct the building exceeds the capabilities of one person, it follows that its removal would similarly be incomprehensible to the individual.I then went on to make the obvious point that the collective expertise required to create the structures in and of itself represented the strength of New Yorkers, and the bonds we share with foreign nations.

Six years later, my participation in When Art (or in What Regard) leads me to consider just how far this philosophy extends. For example, does a mass reaction to the loss or damage of a structure or artwork concretely identify the sublime (a vast magnitude beyond measurement), or are they simply misplaced characterizations of objects that have related political agendas or larger philosophical ideas attached to them? Is the sublime malleable? Will the absence and subsequent socio-political history of those fallen buildings change the functionality of their aesthetics? The idea I floated by the reporter provided no window into my own aesthetic judgments on the statue or buildings, and for good reason since it really wasn’t the time to go into why I thought the towers were more of a feat in engineering than they were an architectural marvel, what with their purposelessly aggressive and showy structure.As I suggest above however, since that time I’ve come to see the buildings much more positively.

Frustratingly however writing this piece brings me no closer to being able to conclude whether sublimity can exist or be created within absence and memory.Unlike the simple motivations behind traveling into the city to clean a few vetrines, locating aesthetic grace and magnitude within a field of political and social relationships is murky business. So, I still don’t know if collective memory and grief is powerful enough to change the functionality of aesthetics but I suspect it might be. It evidently is enough to garner the support of a nation for a senseless war.

REUTERS: Wednesday evening. A five-year old girl unearthed an object in the undergrowth of a Long Island City park. The girl's mother referred to its indescribable beauty and told journalists that her daughter is still recovering from its impact. Scientists have dated the object to the early twenty-first century and describe it as a simple polymer comprised of hydrogen and carbon atoms in an unknown configuration. Reports that the surface of the shape is covered with proscribed words, such as unity and co-operation, remain unconfirmed.

Hotel Ballymun, a large scale month long sculptural performance which inhabited the top floor of a soon-to-be demolished public housing tower block in Dublin, by converting it into a beautifully sparse hotel, was artist Seamus Nolan's response to working with the community in an area undergoing a vast regeneration process. Hotel Ballymun insisted on the re-imagining of a discredited architecture, a scapegoat for governmental indifference and inefficient public services, and celebrated the achievements of those who have lived in that community despite the stigmas and difficulties inherent in so doing. The Hotel was managed and staffed by Ballymun residents, and the bespoke furniture was made by local people from articles left behind in the vacated flats. Each afternoon and night, guests were entertained by local writers, musicians and other performers. Hotel Ballymun confronted prejudice against a population of 20,000 people, almost 100% of whom are residents of social housing, by attracting the participation and attention of those who had never been to the area, only ever hearing of it on news bulletins since its creation in the 60's. It was also, unashamedly, a deeply affecting elegy for brutalist yet utopian modernist architecture, which has, by community insistence, ceded to more traditional forms of housing. www.hotelballymun.com

What makes a Site specific sculpture to be specific about a site? What happens if this sculpture is mobile? And what happens then if a sculpture always takes the shape of the place where it is placed?

Is it the same sculpture? Is it site specific? Does a sculpture needs some thing in particular to be site specific? Is in its shape? In the material from which it is build? May be in the tale behind the sculpture? Or the memory?

How to be with out memory? Do we change depending on the place we are? Do we change depending on the country we are? Do we behave differently depending on the architectural context we are? Are we what surround us? Or Are we what we Are? Then in regard of what?

May be time? May be because we are in constant transformation, being what we are… In Time… Until we die.

But the what? Sculpture may be as a Map! But Where does a map begin? A system of writing that start and end depending on our direction, need, intention and approach. But is it possible to have to directions in time? This require us to be able to have parallel alternatives at once; like the lovers that find each other after walking around the bock, beating, ticking. (at once). But what if the object is just one? But what if our time isn’t “more” But “less”? But what if never gets the other way around?

But what if we could see at once the same object going two ways at once, but in just one time? But if the object in question is clock? Then what? May be is because of the light. May be the light is the only thing to compress and change the perception of time. Just like a Flash forward, and a flash back in a film. But are closer?

Sculpture has a Kind of time, that depends on the directions, size, and possibilities of perception, that depend mainly on its shape, and materials. Some sculpture are minted to be “memorials” other ones “Monuments”, some others have their own kind of time. And their layers of reflective ability (reading) change depend on the historical moment in which they are read or confronted.

Do a sculpture that changes constantly, still be the same sculpture? (Just like a Plant). Is it possible to make a sculpture with time? Who many kind of time Do Photography Have? Is a photograph a condensed system of times?

Who many ways do we have to experience Space? Liquid? Solid? Gas? Conceptual? Distorted? Is it possible a space with out space? Is Sculpture matter on space? Who many types of Time Do exist? Is it equal to each Kind of time a equal kind of space?

By touching. By describing… By thinking…

What does time have to learn from Space?

The will in nature after Schopenhausser. 2002. Wood table, book, and plants.

Tropicalia. 2001. Minilab C-Prints. Ø 90 X 10 Cm.

The space that occupy my body in the space… 2001. 6 - 20X24” C-Prints. And Plexiglas cube. (with the volume of my body).

August 02, 2007

commit your obligations / have no obligations / become famous / create several good music pieces / know well 6 languages / become suddenly informed that in Lithuanian population grew up to 40 millions / spend the time well and never work technical work / receive big inheritance in foreign country / learn piloting of aircraft / at least once to get the space / get another planet (moon, mars, extra-solar, etc.) / have a plenty of good clothing / spent all your time perfecting of yourself / make your ideas to become true / keep strict daily schedule / be sure that your computer you've bought never gets old / be sure that the last visit at a dental technician will be the last one / have an ability to go anywhere any time / have no financial problems. Never / make sure that the spring have no more influence to you than any other time / go to the sea or to the country side this Saturday / have an extensive audio and video collection / produce the idea with "wide wall" / be exposed to the risk in dangerous situation and receive no harm / be suddenly informed that Vilnius grew up to 5 millions population and there will be grandiose buildings started / meet the UFO at least once and if they were not existing - know it / live long enough to fulfil your curiosity / make that sand will not be applied in Vilnius streets in winter time / have big environmental interface menu in which would be possible to select the best one for particular situation / peep over the border of consciousness / have a good separator for selecting information / make that these wishes never come true / make that all and even contradicting wishes come true / be sure you will have never wash your clothes and they will remain clean / have always some time and material for rethinking / get the good skate rollers with leather boots / make sure that close relatives and friends will have no big problems / make your perception from at least three points of view / loose understanding of the meanings of stereotypic sentences / correct the past / do not have any wish to correct past / do not waist time / have a wish that everything would go as if it would be better for You / get the possibility that you could never touch the door hands / have a huge selection of drinks in your bar and be sure it will never reflect on your health / learn flying / see yourself from the inside and outside / find perfect subject of love / compress culture and civilisation so that any time you could extract back any situation from there / go abroad to study narrational structures / be like this: when having something, be passionate about it as if not having it at all / loose your experience gained in the last four years. / spend vacations in some interesting places / learn playing the music instrument (accordion, etc.) / be sure that this text has the end.

Old News is a project about information and media, and will continue for 5years begining (2004).

There is nothing new about Old News"There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or onetwenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. IfBlackburn is typical, there are two million holes in Britains roads, and300,000 in London".This was what John Lennon read in Daily Mails Far and Near column on 17January 1967. Lennon transformed the news into the last verse of the song ADay In A Life, the last song on The Beatles 1967 album Sergeant PeppersLonely Hearts Club Band. Reading about the 4,000 potholes in Blackburn,Lancashire, may start you thinking about the flood of information that isconstantly printed and possibly read by millions of people around the globeYou may begin to think about the amount of information that is accessible toan individual. Read, unread, understood, misunderstood.

Old News is a project about information and media.In Old News you will find images and articles selected by 24 individuals. Icould have been 24 farmers, dental technicians or real estate agentschoosing the articles and images, but the information in Old News wasselected by artists. Starting in January 2004, I invited one artist a monthand continued to do so for twelve months. Each invited artist was asked toinvite a fellow artist to participate and both clipped four articles orimages (possibly one every week) from news sources s/he read during thedesignated month. All articles appear, as they were sent to me. Some havebeen reduced in size, due to the size of the original clipping, butotherwise they have not been edited. A few artists have culled theirarticles and images from webnews sources, some have re-worked themgraphically, and that is how they are shown here.

When I first started thinking about Old News, I thought about how news,newspapers and information influence my life. How I select my news sourcesand how information can be manipulated in the media. I thought of how Iwould react to my own Old News request. Would I read and look at the dailypaper differently? While you read this, you might think about what you woulddo.I was curious how artists would react to my request and make theirselections. The artists approached the Old News project in a variety ofways. News and newspapers have been used in many different creativeprocesses long before Lennon discovered the 4,000 holes. Recycling newsarticles, headlines, images and using information from the print media wereat the core of visual art in the 20th century. The expressions are many andvaried from intervention, incorporation, appropriation, reproduction of newto self published newspapers and montaged newspaper fragments.

Many artists, writers and musicians have inspired me in my research. I wouldlike to mention Sylvan Hoffman and C. Hartley Grattan's book News of theWorld, a History of the World in Newspaper-style (1953), On Kawaras I read(1966 to the present), the news paper insert in Dead Kennedy's album Bedtimefor Democracy (1986), Tom Lehrer's That Was The Year That Was (1965), KenLoach's segment from the film September 11 and Guy Schraenen's exhibitionKunstzeitung/Zeitungskunst about the history of artworks in and aroundnewspapers. I looked for, but regrettably never found, Aleksandr Mosolov'sFour Newspaper Advertisements (Chetyre gazetnyh obyavlenya) a 1926composition inspired by real advertisements in the Russian newspaperIzvestija.